I'm out from UE4 to Unity

General Feedback & Requests
21

Having recently come the other direction (Unity to Unreal), I feel like I should comment. Game engines are complex and they have to meet the needs of many, many developers with different needs and abilities. In a sense, game engines are not end-products but rather are tools to help build end-products. Every game engine will have frustrations associated with using with it, and every game dev project will have its own frustrations apart from the engine. It’s the nature of the beast.

If you give up too quickly when you’re frustrated, you’ll never ship a game.

A few big difference between Unity and Unreal that I feel compelled to point out a few things that have nothing to do with the relative capabilities of the engine:

  • Epic really does listen to what we say, both the good and the bad. Over the course of 4.1 through 4.6, I’ve seen my list of complaints and frustration points whittled down substantially and on many occasions, I’ve gotten help directly from Epic employees. I did not get that kind o f help or support from Unity, despite paying them a lot more money.

  • In that same time period that Epic shipped five major editions of Unreal, Unity has shipped how many? Relying on anything in an unreleased version is dangerous. It may not show up, and even if it does, there’s no way to know when. Unity has been promising their uses a 64-bit editor since 2012 and even today, they still haven’t shipped a non-beta 64-bit editor, which is a huge pain point if you work with large levels or assets.

  • Unity is closed source, so if they don’t deign to fix your bug (and if you have bug or problem most people don’t), you have no other options. With Unreal, you can go into the source and fix it yourself, or pay somebody else to fix it.

Maybe Unity is a better fit for your needs, but you should at least consider the possibility that it’s not.

22

People! This is a place to provide feedback for Epic, not to start comment wars on which Engine is better. As previously said by - Both engines have their benefits, and thus you could argue all day but it comes down to personal preference. This forum is to provide feedback for Epic, not to fight with other users! :slight_smile:

23

Thanks for keeping a high level of professionalism and for helping to keep the comments on topic, everyone.

24

Never seen anything as good either, haven’t looked at the audio stuff though.

25

ok ive had enough, time to actually make some games, see you over there AntonioModer and
of course ill keep an eye on ue4, best of luck everyone :slight_smile:

26

ok ive had enough, time to actually make some games, see you over there AntonioModer and
of course ill keep an eye on ue4, best of luck everyone :slight_smile:
[/QUOTE]

Good luck with your project tegleg :wink:
Hope everything works out for you.

Best regards

27

I think it’s a bit naive to expect completely smooth ride with other engines. I would bet you will experience some level of frustration in different areas whatever your engine of choice will be.

28

there is nothing naive about it. i have been making games since the mid 80’s so i do kinda know what im doing more or less.
i took to ue3 like a duck to water, got on like a house on fire, or whatever phrase you want. ue4 however, there are so many things about it i just don’t like or don’t get on with its very much counterproductive to continue with it.
apart from workflow issues the major stumbling block is the way its being developed, the ethos behind Epics decision making.
during the beta tests i had high hopes and just put the broken or missing features and general awkwardness down to it being in beta stage.
a year or so on and its still the same, they pile on the features with little regard as to whether they work or if its something users actually want. just look at the roadmap, things with lots of votes meaning this is what people want are way down at the bottom and generally never get any closer to being developed. things that are added are usually on the rendering side of things, as if it doesn’t look good enough. well it does look good enough and they should leave it alone and do more popular and interesting things with it.
if you want to make an unreal tournament clone with stunning graphics for high end gaming pc’s then this is the engine for you, as long as you can get into the unreal mindset and actually work with the tools.
because im essentially making games on my own there just isnt enough hours in the day for that, and with ue4 most of those hours for me are wasted hitting brick walls and dead ends.
well ive had enough of that, its not worth it if i want to actually produce a game within my lifetime.
maybe in a year or 2 ue4 will have matured enough to allow this and ill come back to it, right now its an incomplete and broken nightmare with horrible tools and, for want of a better word, spacky physics.
of course i will hit some roadblocks and experience some frustration with whatever engine i chose, but i know for sure i will get more done than i have with ue4.
ue4 in its present state is just not for me.

ill leave it at that, enough rambling.

29

It doesn’t but that besides the point. What does rendering engrineers are supposed to do ? They work on rendering part of engine, because that’s what know best.
You don’t hire rendering engineers to work on tools…

Besides that. Things voted are pushed top. Look at Niagara. It has lots of votes it was in backlog, Epic hired new guy, and now Niagara is under active development. I say Epic is developing what community wants. They just don’t develop what you want.

Right. I’m pretty sure Fable Legends is not clone of Unreal Tournament…

As matter of fact, engine doesn’t have any game genre functionality build in, at any level. Maybe besides AbilitySystem, but that’s not yet done, and probably won’t be for some time.

So I have to wonder:

What types of games are you making that you hitting walls at every corner ? It must be some very niche and special ;>

I haven’t to encounter any roadblock. And if there are some small blockers, I either fix them or ask someone if that’s real block or just my lack of knowledge.

30

i knew there would be 1 hehe, yeah right. replace guns with swords and what do you get… guys running round fighting, i could have said doom, cod, , clone and it would have the same meaning.

i just cant seem to do anything productive with ue4 for a million reasons and that’s the way it is. there is no real point giving you a massive list to shoot down.
better to bow out now and use something i can make games with than to continue getting nowhere with this engine.

31

Just to give my two cents :smiley:

You can create every kind of game in a very short period of time -> e.g currently I’m creating something like “Anno” and in around 1 day I nearly finished the entire gameplay programming part (with blueprints it was super easy -> of course I will have to improve some gameplay parts that I made, but it’s working perfectly) -> no guns, no running around…nothing to do with UT :wink:

Of course the engine has his “bad” sides (vegetation… :p), but they will be improved over time as long as the community gives good feedback. Meanwhile you can live with those bad sides, try to fix them by yourself ( ^^) or find another engine that can do what you want :slight_smile:

But lets stay on topic in here -> normally we should discuss about physics :smiley:

32

To me this whole engine choice thing boils down to, on what level do you plan to compete with the thousands of other games out there?

If it’s only about the gameplay I would choose Unity 4. Naturally this choice lends itself to mobile platforms where graphics aren’t as important. I wouldn’t try to put Unity games on Steam (Greenlight). That usually doesn’t end well.*
If it’s only about the graphics I would choose CRYENGINE even though making even basic solid gameplay will be a pain. Also check their EULA and make sure you are ok with their conditions, they are not exactly the most favourable.
If you want the best of both worlds I would choose Unreal Engine 4, but you need to be aware that you probably won’t be able to get as good graphics as CE and not as polished gameplay as Unity in the same development time.
That last bit about development time is key btw, you can make pretty much any game in Unity or UE4 (CE is too restricted), it’s just a matter of how much time it takes to develop it.

*Unity 5 might change this situation, but I kind of doubt it. Slapping a standard PBR shader onto everything will probably not help much, but I’m willing to be surprised.

33

In case you are only interested in PC games another way to look at it for me is: If you choose Unity you will be fighting an uphill battle to get “good enough” looking graphics at some point to be able to sell your game properly.
If you choose Unreal Engine 4 and aim for good PC game graphics you can have that almost right away, but at some point you will be fighting an uphill battle to get “good enough” performance to be able to sell your game properly.
Personaly I would choose the second situation anytime, if only because you can choose the highest graphics setting to record your release trailer with on your high end PC.
Whereas putting an FPS counter on your Unity PC game trailer could be a little embarrasing. :stuck_out_tongue:

PS: This is all just based on my own game projects and games I played from fellow indie devs and saw their sales stats etc. so this is highly subjective obviously. duh

34

Look at this:

  • 7 UE games from students
  • made in 2 weeks
  • with only 5 days of training
  • zero code

And they do not look even a little like Unreal Tournament…

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Look at the WIP and finished projects forums. There are many different games coming along nicely.

So there are many people that don’t have the problems you have. Maybe part of the problem is you…

35

to quote myself

a quote from XilenceX

its taking me, yes me, not you, too much time to do… nothing much with ue4. so i will use another engine.
i have already uninstalled ue4 and feel a weight lifted of my shoulders
onward!

please dont take this all the wrong way people, if you are happy with ue4 that’s great i hope your game is a success :slight_smile:

36

The trello board is not a priority queue. Choosing what features to prioritize is a complex process based on immediate need (and how many thing depend on it), the amount of effort required, the resources available (programmers are not interchangeable), and whether there is a clear idea of what needs to be done. Not to mention, a lot of the items on the board are really proxies for a number of tasks. Geometry 2.0 is a great example of all of these things: it’s need is not immediate for the vast majority of people (there are plenty of DCC tools to pickup the slack), it’s a massive undertaking, there’s no clear direction to take (it’s only been identified as an issue, but there are many options to take which there would be a great many disagreements on), and really, it’s quite a few tasks put together (tools, processing, and runtime).
If the state of the roadmap says anything, it’s that the tools team really needs more people.

Indoor scenes look good enough, but outdoor environments still need a lot of work. I’d also like to point out that the category with the largest average votes (outside of the documentation categories) is rendering.

See, for me I’ve taken the opposite direction. I came here from Unity, primarily because of their philosophy. A) if you think Epic is bad with prioritizing new features over making existing features work, clearly you’ve not been part of the Unity community for very long. B) The API seems to want to force you into terrible decisions. Want to know how many of some native object you have? Better create a copy of the array on the managed side, look at the count, then destroy it! C) Unity has what I like to call “the wall”. Generally, development proceeds fairly smoothly, until your project hits a certain level of complexity, then it all goes to Hell. Library corruption all over the place, unexplainable crashes (and your dumps basically go into a black hole and are never seen again). The editor is especially bad at cleaning up after itself, so I’ll often find myself restarting it after every run after a while.

Performance is also an issue. Not really so much internally. I think it’s generally “ok” internally. More performance of your own code. C# is fine for a great many things, but falls apart for certain tasks (especially when we are talking about 5 year old mono runtimes). But here, that wall is insurmountable. Native plugins you make can only talk to managed plugins you make: you have to marshal across the native/managed divide twice in order to get things visible on the screen, eliminating most of the gains you could potentially receive. And the API is really bad at doing things in batches, which is really the only good way of limiting the marshal cost. There are just things you can not do even if you have the hardware to do it. And that is a problem for me.

And there’s another big issue that’s more subtle: Unity does not make games. At best, they make tech demos. There are so many absurd blind spots in their system that it boggles (I highly recommend never attempting to ship a console game in Unity). With UE4, you can easily see how internal usage improves the tool, and it will only get better as usage increases (hope to see an Epic project using UMG instead of pure Slate soon). Unity does not have that and it shows.

UE4 is by no means perfect. But it is definitely capable; and most importantly, you have options instead of restrictions. I’ll take the extra work of filling in deficiencies over being completely blocked off any day. I’m a programmer, after all. Solving problems is my job description.

37

tegleg is just mad because physics in ue4 are not very good for doing the crazy stuff he wants to do with gravity orbiting and advanced vehicles, if this is what your project revolves around and is the core, then maybe Unity5 will be better

But right now, to get better performance and graphics it would require unity5 beta since 5 is not out yet, and no asset on unitys asset store is updated to work with 5 yet, which is half of what makes unity compete with ue4.
So right now its kind of like were stuck waiting on both to be honest…

I’ve used unity cryengine udk & ue4 and I’m sick of moving through engines, I dont want to move back to unity once again just because of physics issues, also Unity does not have networking/multiplayer out of the box which would be a nightmare to implement myself,
so I hope Epic puts more resources and hires more help to get more of these issues ironed out, I know games like border lands and many big game who use unreal engine are going to be worrying and have a dilemma with the same things tegleg is

And

I dont see how cryengine has better graphics, there is only like 1 g.i. bounce from the sun and when you go into a somewhat night setting / darkish environment it looks way to washed out dark & bland, nothing offered in that engine that makes it stand out

38

yes i agree how ue4 is, because it is. the source access means so much alone. then there is the 2 way communication between users and developers, its almost unheard of. this community is unlike any other i have seen, so alive, friendly and helpful.
but all these things don’t make using ue4 a pleasurable experience for me. im not in it to make the next big thing on steam or whatever, i do it because i like it. so when i don’t like using an engine, and am not producing anything, its time to change engine.

unity is not my first choice by any means, its more the ‘im outa here’ sentiment.

i will without a doubt return to ue4 at some point in the future and will keep one eye on its evolution. ill maybe even have a play with it now and then, but i will probably use Project Anarchy to make mobile games.
it has a solid physics engine by havoc, unlike ue4’s current incarnation of physx. its semi-open source, not as good as ue4 but better than unity. doesn’t look as good as ue4 either but it looks way better than unity. because im not making the next big thing, to cover as many potential players performance is a major factor. ue4 is basically useless for all but a handful of devices, project anarchy will run on lower spec devices no problem, shadows, reflections the lot.

39

If developers changed game engines every time they stuck on something you’d hardly see a game being published.
I’m sure your physics bug for the car can’t be a reason to quit, unless you are making the next Gran Turismo, I doubt though.

All this thread reminds me of is too much talk and no work.

40

I already said this in some other topic so moderator don’t have to comment on this.

The problem with the unreal engine is not the engine, but the documentation. And I’m referring to the API documentation.
Its missing sample codes and more in-depth information. And I know Epic games is working hard on this part to improve it bit still it’s a big problem. This is what makes Unity great for now. Unity is well documented and the most important function have sample codes. And for new programmers this is really important.

The only way to learn the unreal engine now is by reading the existing code and this takes a lot of time. Its UDK al over again. It took me full year to master UDK and unreal script it took me few weeks to master Unity and c#.
For now I also use Unity for my main project and play with the Unreal Engine in my free time. I really hope someday I can make the switch to the Unreal engine.